Satire

Cafe Society
1

I love comedy and I love satire in particular. I’ve been a Daily Show and Colbert Report viewer since the beginning (media satire), I’m crazy for The Simpsons (cultural satire), and I think Duck Soup and Dr. Strangelove (war) are brilliant.

But I finished reading Gulliver’s Travels on Wednesday and found I’m hungry for more of this stuff. I know I need to get around to reading A Modest Proposal, it’s kind of embarrassing I haven’t done it already. So what do Dopers recommend? Clue me in.

2

Can’t go wrong with Discworld (e.g., “Moving Pictures” for a combo satire of Hollywood and the development of suburban shopping malls). Cultural satire mixed with satire of tropes from Fantasy, SF and even detective fiction. And usually, a nugget or two of Something To Say (especially the novels featuring DEATH).

3

Are foreign type movies OK? If so Belgium’s Man Bites Dog does the business for gonzo documentaries. If you’re into reality TV, Series 7 might cure your addiction.

4

It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis. '30’s era satire of American populist politics.

5

Have you read Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary?

6

So far this is mostly new to me. I read Babbitt when I was around 11, although I was probably too young to really get it. I’ve read two or three Discworld books - I wasn’t wild about them, but I remember liking Reaper Man. Good call on Devil’s Dictionary.

7

Just got back from The Strand, where I picked up The Devil’s Dictionary, as well as books by Perelman, Thurber, and Keillor, which may or may not fit here depending on how they go.

8

Have you tried anything by Tom Sharpe? The Wilt series I found were very funny.

9

Alice in Wonderland is, essentially, a satire. It’s more whimsy than pointed, but still a satire.

10

Candide, by Voltaire

11

The author’s own review:

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  1. Since you have read and enjoyed Gulliver’s Travel, I’ll start with something even older: Simplicius Simplicissimus by Grimmelshausen; it’s a picaresque novel set in the Thirty Years’ War (1618 to 1648), the war that devastated Germany more than WWI or WWII.

We follow Simplicius Simplicissimus through a country where war has become permanent and the people have adapted to it by turning more than half mad. You could call it a satire, an adventure or horror novel, a tragedy or a travesty, in any way, it’s a tough read but worth a try.

  1. Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich wrote some great satires; they are sometimes funny, often disturbing and will tell you quite a lot about the strange culture of the German Empire prior to its self-destruction.

Two recommendations:

[ul]
[li]Professor Unrat / The Blue Angel (you might have seen the movie with Marlene Dietrich)[/li]
[li]Man of Straw[/li][/ul]

  1. Another worthwhile satire you might not know is The Good Soldier Švejk by the Czech humorist Jaroslav Hašek. The novel, or rather novels, describe the strange adventures of the Czech soldier Švejk during WWI; he belongs to the Austro-Hungarian Army, at least for some time, but he has no idea what the conflict is all about and why he should be part of it.

  1. The Tin Drum by Guenter Grass isn’t a satire, but it makes good use of all its elements; and if you like magical realism, you’ll find here an early example – and one that doesn’t originate from Latin America.

  2. I’m pretty sure you have already read it but if you missed it, pick up Catch-22 by Joseph Heller; the movie isn’t bad either.

I think, the earlier Discworld novels, like Moving Pictures, lack the critical attitude to qualify as satires; imo, they are parodies.

But, ** Marley23**, if you think that the Discworld novels fit within the pattern you are searching for, I highly recommend
6) Jasper FForde’s Thursday Next series as well as his novels about the Nursery Crime Division in an alternate Redding.

These are the only novels in my list that aren’t disturbing, they are pure fun.

13

Christopher Buckley writes satires of Washington. Perhaps his most famous is Thank You for Smoking, made into a good and unfortunately seldom seen movie.

Speaking of seldom seen, *Jaws *author Peter Benchley tried to shift course mid-career with a pair of satires that nobody bought, forcing him to move back to large fish. Q Clearance is a Washington satire that predates Buckley and is nastier, but not as nasty as Rummies, a dark and vivid recreation of his time at a rehab center.

Benchley is humorist Robert Benchley’s grandson. Robert is simply one of the great writers of the 20th century. His work is much too sunny to be called satire but you can’t be a great humorist without satirizing the world around you. Read him anyway. The other great humorist is S. J. Perelman, who is more a parodist but that’s only a stone’s throw away from satire. His early works (pre-1950) are his best. From that era Corey Ford was the best literal parodist and his collections of parodies of the famous writers of the day (Hemingway, Dreiser) are still totally readable if you know the originals and often if you don’t. They’re collected in Meaning No Offense, The John Riddell Murder Case, and In The Worst Possible Taste that last title taken from a real review of the earlier books.

Peter de Vries was the leading satirist of the 1950s and 1960s, especially on the changing social and sexual standards of suburbia and academia. That makes him feel extremely dated today but he’s a name that can’t be ignored.

Of that period, Randall Jarrell wrote the Great American Academic Satire, Pictures from an Institution. I don’t know if it holds up, but it made his reputation.

Max Barry is more up-to-date, indeed ultramodern. He’ll always be remembered for Jennifer Government, a novel set in a future where everybody is property of businesses. It’s broad but very good.

Everybody has an antecedent and Barry’s is Douglas Coupland. His Generation X created the name and defined a generation. I like is *Microserfs *best. Although set in the present and a satire of working for a company like Microsoft back in the early days when that was an adventure, it’s the novel that best defines what the science fiction world of the future would feel like to live in, because those early adopters really felt they were living in a future nobody else had.

14

A writer working today who is pretty snide, although I don’t know if he is doing satire, is Joe Queenan.

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I don’t think Queenan has ever written fiction. True satire is rare in nonfiction, but if Marley is interested, that opens up another world.

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That’s true, unless you count the screenplay to the film Twelve Steps to Death, which he wrote and directed on a small budget. The OP didn’t say anything about limiting it to fiction.

17

G.K. Chesterton is very good, very witty, very british and all over the place. books.google.com has this to say about “The Man Who Was Thursday”:

The Man Who Was Thursday

(I suspect it has more than a bit to do with the origin of the TV Series"The Prisoner")

All his works are highly recommended, of course. If you like detective fiction, you might like his deconstruction of the genre via his “Pater Brown” books.

18

When is Father Brown ever referred to in English as “Pater Brown”? Yes, I know that it’s theoretically possible to call him by that name, but who does so?

19

Seconded.

20

Sorry about that. For some reason I first read the books in german, so I guess I refer to him like that.

To answer your question: Who does so? DiggitCamara does so!